Comment by mattlutze | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattlutze | Hacker News Reader

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Bell also "just" provided telephone service, but had a nation-wide practical monopoly, and so was broken up into different regional operators.

The US has since gotten bad at dealing with companies like this. A company like Google or Amazon could/should be broken up into a few parts and would likely result in those parts together being worth more than when it was just the one company, and more competition in each industry.

Too early and the break-up can kill innovation. Too late and the company will have been a rent-seeking operation for so long that it chokes out dynamism.

It might be too early for OpenAI, but we shouldn't wait until they own all of the next Internet in the way Facebook, Google and Amazon ended up.

Yeah: it had a nationwide monopoly. Breaking up the Bells meant breaking that monopoly. That was the public policy goal of forcibly reorganizing the company.

How do you apply that to the OpenAI case? You have to draw the rest of the owl here.

You don't seem to have read the comment you're replying to carefully enough.

No, I'm just not being clear enough. OpenAI doesn't have a monopoly. They don't even meaningfully have colluding BUs; you can't "break them up" (you'd basically just be killing it).

Killing or intentionally degrading a business can be legit public policy, but then just say that, don't pretend that the problem is that OpenAI is anticompetitive.

Here's the relevant line you seem to have missed:

> It might be too early for OpenAI, but we shouldn't wait until they own all of the next Internet in the way Facebook, Google and Amazon ended up.

He wasn't proposing breaking it up as it is, which is what your comment assumes.

However, as I said in another comment, they do have other products (Sora and others in the pipeline that are meaningfully separate from their core product). I'd agree it's too early to break them up (at least by conventional anti-trust standards), and that if anything, they should be regulated on other dimensions.

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